Jews Caught between Hitler and Stalin (article)

To live in East Central Europe in the era of Hitler, Stalin, and the Second World War was unlucky for all people—most especially for Jews. The Nazis were determined to exterminate all

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Jews, and the Soviets distrusted Jews because of their association with capitalism (however small in scale), relatives living abroad, and Stalin’s hidden anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was rampant among the general population, resulting in their killing many Jews upon the arrival of the German armies. My focus is on the two survivors of a family of seven. After describing their early lives and losses in these troubled times, I will discuss some of the psychological legacy of their experiences.

On January 22, 1931, in Soviet Russia (now Ukraine), twin boys Zvi (Gregory) and Zeev (later Vladimir, and finally André) Bukstein were born to their engineer father Isaac and mother Rachel. When the boys were two, their parents, older sister Jaffa, and they slipped over the border, escaping from communist Russia to a town in Poland, where Isaac’s parents lived. Isaac helped to operate two mills owned by his parents, and the family lived comfortably. The children spoke Russian as their first language, Yiddish with their grandparents, and Polish or Ukrainian on the street with their neighbors. In public school, they learned in Polish and went to Hebrew school every day as well.

On August 23, 1939, the foreign ministers of Stalin and Hitler, the two great European mass murderers of the 20^th century, signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Its secret provisions provided for the invasion and destruction of Poland by Germany and Russia. The Buksteins fell into the Soviet-controlled half of Poland, which meant that they did not have to live in the ghettos or wear a Jewish star with the word Jew (Jude) sewn on it. However, they did become casualties of a class war that the communists waged against capitalists, both big and small. The two mills were expropriated, and Isaac and his father were made ordinary workers. After eight months, Isaac Bukstein was arrested as an enemy of the working class and the state and taken away, never to be heard from again by his family. Three nights later, Rachel and her three children were taken from their home to a crowded freight car, to be joined by her in-laws and other class enemies, on a terrible ride to an uncertain life.

The unheated train headed east toward a desolate, unknown region. Its passengers did not know why they were there any more than where they were going. There is little doubt that 40-year-old

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Rachel felt her family’s situation could not be worse. Yet, had she lived in the German occupied western sector of Poland, the situation would most likely have been even worse.

Had the Bukstein family not been deported eastward, over a year later the invading Germans would have simply killed them indiscriminately, as they did all Jews upon their entry into Russian-held Poland. In fact, a tourist guide to Holocaust sites in Poland reports 800 Jews in their town were burned to death in a barn by the Germans in August 1941. This is what would have happened. What did happen was terrible, but it may ultimately have saved the lives of the brothers.

Six weeks of misery on the train began a process of reconciliation between Rachel and the elder Buksteins. They had prized their own three daughters and looked down upon the daughter-in-law as not good enough to be married to their only son. On the train and in exile, they would appreciate her treating them as well as she treated her own children. For this elderly couple who spoke broken Russian, Rachel’s perfect Russian and comparative youth were a great advantage in understanding and surviving in a strange and frightening world.

The “Siberia” the nine-year olds and their family faced turned out to be freezing cold and brutally hot in the summer, semiarid northern Kazakhstan. After a month and a half of living like cattle on the train, the family disembarked in a small village, only to be taken by ox cart to a still smaller hamlet. All the villagers, informed of the new arrival of Jews, came to the station because it was a “novelty to see a Jew.” Life in the hamlet was primitive, since it had small earth huts, no electricity, and no running water. The boys fetched water from the community well, gathered cow dung for heating and cooking, and hated the horrible stench of the latrine in the backyard.

The Buksteins survived in this strange land where winter brought bitter cold and terrible blizzards only because they arrived in May, when the weather was tolerable, and Rachel had been able to bring some valuables that could be traded for food. Of the six family members, she was at first the only able-bodied person, working on the collective farm, picking potatoes in the field, teach-

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ing kindergarten, and doing whatever else she was told in order to keep body and soul together. Hunger was the family’s constant companion. The boys continued their study of Russian in a oneroom schoolhouse until the age of 12, when they left school to work on the collective farm—making the family’s food allotment less unbearable.

Neither fences nor prison guards held deportees in Siberia or Kazakhstan. It was the harsh climate, great distances between villages, government control of communications, primitive road systems, and village informers that created a sufficient system to control and to hold in all but the most desperate and the most determined. The boys’ grandparents and sister, longing for their life in Poland, thought that anything had to be better than their life in Kazakhstan and escaped, dressed as peasants. Soviet Security Police, then called The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD), made frequent visits to Rachel. Attempting to avert suspicion and punishment, she protested indignantly that her husband’s parents had stolen her daughter Jaffa. The catastrophic events of World War II would destroy the escapee’s “best-laid plans” as Germany invaded Russia, bringing the Holocaust to the areas it occupied.

The whereabouts of the escapees remained unknown. The only evidence consisted of several letters from them; the last arrived postmarked from the Russian city of Kazan. It said, “The world is on fire.” In retrospect, it is easy to understand this as a reference to the June 1941 German invasion of Russia, which Soviet censorship prevented them from writing about directly. Censorship also kept Jaffa and her grandparents from knowing the horrors that awaited them if they continued on their quest to return home to German occupied Poland. Subsequently, there is little doubt that they were caught and killed in the Holocaust, although Gregory Bukstein held onto the hope until the end of his life that his sister could somehow have survived.

The greatest tragedy in the boys’ lives was the death of their beloved mother. When the war came to an end in May 1945, Rachel thought of gathering food and religious objects to put together some sort of a belated bar mitzvah ceremony. In search of these, she walked to the next village, about 19 miles away. On the way

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home, on December 24^th (Christmas Eve), she was overtaken by a blizzard. Her frozen body was found 13 days later. Gregory got some men to help him dig a shallow grave in the rock solid earth, and Rachel’s body was laid to rest. Zeev (later André) was torn with guilt, never forgiving himself for not being present to help bury his beloved mother, because there were not enough rags to cover his feet on that freezing January day. The distraught boys were taken in by a neighbor and felt “completely lost.”

About six weeks after the funeral, the brothers were put on a train back to Poland, since Stalin was returning deported people because he wanted to maintain wartime solidarity with the allies and was courting the favor of the Eastern Europeans. The boys ended up in a temporary displaced persons (DP) camp in Poland after a harrowing experience in which the brothers were almost separated. Representatives of a kibbutz won them over partly with delousing, good food, clean clothes, and clean, separate beds. They had some relatives in Israel and were drawn to the idea of a Jewish homeland. Unfortunately for the brothers’ hopes, the British, who still held a mandate on Palestine, were working to keep survivors from reaching the “promised land” because they feared Arab riots against them and civil war. In 1947, the boys joined over 4,500 children, women, and elderly on the ship Exodus. The British turned the ship away, and the boys went to the uncertain life in a German DP camp rather than accept the offer of French citizenship.

In the following year when the British left Palestine, the Bukstein brothers achieved their goal of being part of the establishment of Israel. Claiming to be a year older than they actually were and despite their lack of medical training both were accepted in the Israeli military in the war of independence and served as medics.

Life has a way of taking people in many different directions. Young Gregory (Zvi) “loved medicine very much” and would have been delighted to have made dentistry or medicine his career, partly because many mentors the boys found in the DP camps were medical professionals. Regrettably, since he had no way of financing a medical education, Gregory would make his career first as a government employee in Israel and mostly as a businessman in America. While in Israel, both Buksteins became enthralled with the

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arts, leading Zeev to go to Paris for ballet and voice training, where he took the name of André Pascal.

Eventually, both brothers ended up in New York City, sharing a common apartment and collecting art that was subsequently donated to Ramapo College of New Jersey. Gregory made a good living exporting cattle hides to be made into leather in Eastern Europe and Kazakhstan. When André’s show business career began to falter, he came to live with his brother in Manhattan. He found success as a tour guide to Latin America and to China in the early days when the Chinese communists opened up their country to the West.

The trauma of their losses had an enormous impact on their subsequent lives. Neither brother married and André appears to have been homosexual, but I found no evidence that he lived with a partner. Shortly after moving to New York without his brother, while struggling to make himself understood in English, Gregory suffered a panic attack. Establishing a friendship and feeling trusted got him through this ordeal. Friendship was a core value of the two brothers. They clung to each other, tolerating relatively short separations during their business trips to the two great communist countries and surrounding themselves with friends in their lovely apartment in New York.

The psychology of identical twinship was important to their development and survival. They had played “the secret game of twins,” as Gregory called it, by sitting in for each other. However, when André died of cancer in 1992, Gregory’s enormous grief diminished his will to live. Every day he drove to his brother’s grave in Westchester County, and before too many years were up, he joined his beloved brother in death.

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